I Think I Found My Best Setup For Iphonography

Here ya go, Mark. This is what the current setup looks like: Oh, and those are cut-in-half ping pong balls acting as diffusers, and the height added by the 2 books underneath the cloud dome is approximately 2 inches.







From this setup I get results like this:



Anyway, I hope this helps you out. It's been a very educational experience with coin photography, especially with the iPhone. I'm really curious about the iPhone 7 since it's supposed to have a real zoom feature.

Pretty soon every CCF member is going to have 5 half ping-pong lamps in their home!

dd27, this is exactly what I am going to do, lol

Jeffrey and Devin,

Let me do a double welcome to both of you for your first time posting on CCF:

Like!

I now use an iPhone on 'virtually' all of my coin shots w/o any problems when I follow tips within this thread.

One of the biggest problems I experience, however, is the implementation of an easy & repeatable procedure to elucidate whizzing marks on problem coins.

It can be done with my iPhone but it takes too much time to reset the lighting intensity and/or optimize the incident angle of the incoming light beam onto the surface of the coin.

The diffusion setup with ping pong balls unfortunately doesn't cut the mustard to adequately highlight faint whizzing striations that could potentially render a coin as problematic by the top three TPGs out there. And to the best of my recollection, TPCs will still charge the customer a fee even though the coin comes back w/o a slab.

I usually end up using the LEDs of my handheld magnifying glass and shine them onto the coin held by alligator clamps attached to one of those cast iron weighted mini coin holders.

This jimmied hodgepodge conglomeration functions but the effort required to obtain a meaningful photo does not make it worth the time unless one is pre-screening using a high dollar specimen.

Any suggestions to achieve the aforementioned goal by more efficiently streamlining a majority of the steps of the typical iphonography setup in this thread would be welcomed.

Since this is my first attempt at iPhone pictures, please be patient. I've got 4 of the Jansjo lights, each one is using a half ping-pong ball to diffuse the light and the phone is sitting on the Nimbus Cloud Dome for height.

Here are 3 different images of my slabbed cents. Positionally, the lighting is the same in all photos. All that was changed is the background. I've never been able to get even a halfway decent picture of a coin in a slab, so I feel this setup has helped in that respect. Having said that, I'm not noticing a lot of difference between the 3 pictures.

This first one is using a light gray background:


This one is using a little darker gray background:


This one is using an almost black background:


Thoughts and/or comments?